LOST IN TRANSLATION, LOST AT SEA

An aerial view of one of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea, claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.

by Philip J Cunningham

From the moment a Chinese fishing trawler and pair of Japanese coast guard boats came into contact at sea on Sept 8, 2010, the waters were instantly muddied, not so much by the minor maritime incident itself, but by bouts of mutual recrimination.

Confusion and concerns raised by the incident were ramped up and amplified by the weight of history, fears about the future, and cultural differences.

Sino-Japanese relations remain sensitive and subject to sudden downturns due to the gravity of historical horrors that continue to haunt the present.

Each side's self-righteous response serves to further irk and annoy the other, setting off a chain reaction in the direction of a meltdown, if not outright conflict.

Accidents happen, as do "accidents on purpose". But even when no provocation can be proven, a collision at sea plumbs deep emotions. A calm, rational handling of the matter is elusive because the slightest misstep or chauvinistic statement resonates with painful memories of the past.



Chinese artist's rendition of the sinking of the chartered transport ship Kowshing by Togo Heihachiro's cruiser, the Naniwa

For example, Japanese naval luminary Togo Heihachiro became a "celebrity" in Japan in 1894, when he ordered his cruiser, the Naniwa, to fire upon, and sink, the Kowshing, a British-flagged transport ship chartered by China. The son of a samurai turned naval hero went on to humiliate the Russians at Port Arthur using a strategy of stoic stealth to defeat an over-confident and under-prepared enemy, which decades later inspired Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku to execute the1941 Pearl Harbour attack.

Admiral Togo was widely feted in his lifetime, not only in Japan but also in England and even in America, though he was understandably unpopular in China for having summarily dispatched a thousand Chinese young men to a watery grave.

Divergent cultural norms have a bearing on the disposition of such a case. Not following the rules _ in this case a demonstrable reluctance to surrender _ was a breach of order and propriety sufficient for the Japanese cruiser captain to perfunctorily blow a few big holes in the hull of the uncooperative craft and watch it drop beneath the waves.

One man's war hero, another man's war criminal. Arguably there was a method to Togo's mad lack of compassion, so much so that even the British, infuriated that a ship piloted by one of their own might be treated in such a fashion, reluctantly acknowledged that the Japanese naval man known as "Johnny Chinaman" during his studies in Britain, had scrupulously followed the rulebook the British themselves had written.

When Togo sank the Kowshing, there was no declaration of war between Japan and China, nor was the British-piloted transport ship in any position to attack. Togo, under instructions to intercept, destroyed the defenceless transport ship, not because it posed a palpable threat, but because it didn't follow orders.

Tasked with preventing the Chinese troops from reaching Korea, Togo followed orders with alacrity, offering a choice of sink or surrender, then bailing out of the water only the British captain and a handful of non-Chinese crew.

Japanese troops intent on taking control of Seoul subsequently overcame their woefully undermanned Chinese rivals, paving the way to the eventual takeover of the entire Korean peninsula and Manchuria.

The naval war that ensued ended with China ceding Taiwan and other territory to Japan. Over the next five decades, China and Japan descended gradually but inexorably into a protracted war that cost tens of millions of lives.

Seen from inside the norms of Japanese naval culture, Togo was not a cold-blooded killer, but a discriminating man, both patient and polite, obedient to authority and fanatic about decorum. Certain things simply had to be done a certain way _ hoisting signal flags, issuing formal salutes _ and he could see no two ways about it.

Togo's refusal to save the drowning Chinese was not viewed as a breach of naval etiquette, because the Chinese, growing mutinous, had proven themselves unwilling to follow the most basic rules as they even turned on the hired British captain, whom they suspected to be in collusion with the Japanese.

Protocol trumped emotion and the Japanese won, not just the one-sided battle to sink what was basically an unarmed ship, but the rather more complex trial in the court of Imperial British opinion and jurisprudence, which concluded that Togo had followed the letter of British-style law to a "T", a triumph of form over substance which left little regard for 1,000 human lives lost in the water.

The victims' lack of discipline, order and decorum presumably put them beyond the pale of naval compassion.

China's future strongman Mao Zedong was just a baby at the time, but he and future generations of patriots would find in the long sorry chain of such calamitous events the inspiration to restore China's pride with a vengeance.

The bumps and scratches of the Sept 8, 2010 Sino-Japanese boat collision incident are indeed trivial in comparison, but the subsequent arrest and detention by the book of the Chinese captain has inflamed the emotions of a Chinese public well-educated in the exploits of Imperial Japan and its predations against their homeland.

Once history is invoked, the wild card of public opinion has to be taken into account.

The United States, like England during the heyday of its imperial might, currently enjoys a strategic alliance with Japan.

Although there have been serious frictions in the US-Japan relationship as of late, due to onerous US military demands for operating space in and around Futenma in Okinawa, it is unlikely that the US will show much sympathy for Chinese sentiments about the contested waters around the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islets so long as Japan is an ally that remains largely observant of American-style military protocol.

As Greenpeace anti-whaling activists and other "emotional" opponents of contemporary Japanese maritime behaviour have learned to their detriment, common sense and compassion are not necessarily extended to those who fail to abide by protocol _ the law, as Japan sees it _ when encountering a Japanese vessel on the waters.

Anti-whaling activists have seen a catamaran craft rammed and capsized; the Japanese side claims it was an "accident"; while in 2008 the Lianhe, a Taiwanese fishing vessel, was struck and sunk by the Japanese Coast Guard patrol boat Koshiki, which managed to rescue the crew.

Similar near-clashes have been reported this month involving boats from Taiwan.

The potential wealth of the contested waters, rich in fish, with a seabed underneath that may well prove rich in oil and minerals, adds to the mounting tension.

Given the deep wounds of a past that saw Japan invade and wreak havoc on China, even the most minor of scrapes in contested waters is a critical event that must be managed with political care and cultural sensitivity.

Given the Japanese tendency to play it by its own rulebook and the Chinese penchant to play it out in public, each side predictably thwarts and infuriates the other.

If the two dominant powers of East Asia once again find themselves on a collision course, history suggests that things will get much worse before they get better _ and no one wins in the end.

Still, it's not too late for all claimants to the contested waters to step back, put aside seemingly intractable claims, and take the long view.

Instead of shedding blood over rocky islets, give back to nature the sea and the seabed until future generations can equitably sort out what belongs to whom.

(first published in the Bangkok Post, September 25, 2010)

Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator. Read more on this article...

BLOWING IN THE WIND

by Philip J Cunningham

Is Japan changing for real? To get a better sense of how Japan is and isn't changing with the urbane Yukio Hatoyama at the helm, in the wake of the Democratic Party of Japan’s stunning electoral victory over the entrenched Liberal Democratic, consider these news stories from around the Japanese archipelago.

First, zoom in on the half-unfinished Yamba Dam in rural Gunma, to see how a multi-billion dollar boondoggle can be stopped dead in its tracks. The LDP, incumbents of a half-century standing, have made an art of pouring money, largely in the form of cement, to rural constituencies scattered around the archipelago, rewarding electoral loyalty while denuding and desecrating the environment with dams, bridges and highways to nowhere.

Hatoyama, in power for little more than a week, suspended the dam project. If there is truly change in the air, it is in the realm of cutbacks on pork-barrel spending. The controversial supplementary budget, a last-dash effort inked by the LDP as it was sinking into obscurity, has been scrapped and the overall budget has been massively trimmed.

Now pull back from the rice fields and hills of Gunma and zoom in on the shimmering Tokyo megalopolis, the largest concentration of human beings on earth, with some 40 million people clustered within a 40 kilometer radius. Not too much green here, but not too many roads to nowhere either; instead a vast, vibrant, complex inter-connected living, breathing super-organism with an arterial system of asphalt and iron; electricity and light, a steady flow of trains and automobiles, but what, no international airport?

Only far-away Narita.

The LDP during the height of its power operated much as an authoritarian communist party might have done in the same era. A swath of isolated rice farms in Chiba was decreed to be the new Tokyo International Airport, even though the project was bitterly opposed by Narita locals from the start, and has been inconveniencing travelers ever since. Situated an incomprehensible 60 kilometers outside of city center, it's an airport only big-time investors in infrastructure and social engineers hoping to discourage the hoi polloi from traveling, could love. in effect banishing the gateway of Tokyo to Chiba.

It was the sort of inconvenience to which one could only sigh "shoganai" as it could not be helped, at least not while the LDP remained in power. Long after violent clashes ceased, Narita remained an armed, barb-wired camp, subjecting visitors to intimidating, but largely theatrical, Star War trooper controls.

Then the LDP loses power and within weeks the DPJ’s Land and Transport Minister, Seiji Maehara, makes a bold proposal, suggesting that homely Haneda Airport, located on Tokyo Bay, snugly close to downtown, be the new hub. What? Move the gateway of Tokyo to Tokyo itself? What an idea! And why not?

Narita, like its patron party the LDP, has too long enjoyed a monopoly at the expense of others. But it has been failing on its own terms as well; it's inconvenience has not discouraged Japan's stoic traveling set from spending yen overseas, but it has stemmed the inflow of tourists and their cash. Foreigners, especially those in need of connecting flights, or on urgent business, bridle at the thought of over-nighting in Narita or detouring through the rice paddies of Chiba on bus and on over-priced trains.

One only need to consider the new airports in Inchon, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to see how Japan isolates itself, with Narita looking more and more a relic of the 1970's sorry domestic politics.

Maehara's bold bid did not go unopposed, however, and he back-tracked the next day after Chiba governor Kensaku Morita (a former actor, he goes by his stage name) made veiled threats during a sputtering televised performance full of innuendo, suggesting the old guard won't give up without a fight.

Zoom away from the troubled waters of Tokyo Bay and zoom in on distant Okinawa, which bears the brunt of the US military footprint in Japan, not just because it is an excellent staging ground for Pacific Ocean policing, but because the better-connected politicians of Japan proper never really took to the sight of uniformed gaijin walking the streets of their prefectures. The result? Outlying Okinawa long ago got stuck with rather more than its share of US bases, partly a legacy of LDP politicking.

The DPJ owes it to the under-represented voices of dissent in Okinawa to re-examine decades of back-room deals, but here, again, Hatoyama, soon to meet Obama, must tread gingerly, lest the game of base allocation become a bitter contest of musical chairs with the US military.

A quick leap the length of Japan up to its northernmost extremity followed by a zoom in on some windswept islets suggests that the new government, like the LDP, is haunted by the past, despite its intelligent core leadership and early moves to improve relations with China and Korea.

Land and Transport Minister Maehara, still reeling from the backlash from his Haneda air hub comments, escaped the heat by flying north to the chilly Southern Kuriles, where he staged a nationalistic photo op courtesy of the brashly patriotic Coast Guard, publicly pining for the return of the Russian-held islands. Gazing at the hazy outline of the distant isles, Maehara, born in 1962, said he was "nostalgic" for the old days before the Kuriles were "illegally occupied" by Russia.

Nostalgic for what? The 1940's? The good old days when these desolate, rocky isles were used to stage a brilliant sneak attack on Pearl Harbor? If a bunch of rocks can evoke such passion, imagine the bouts of nostalgia a Japanese nationalist might experience at the sight of former territories such as Korea and Taiwan?

Yet another indication that the sweeping change of power in Japan has failed to sweep away all the cobwebs of the political realm comes from the Wakayama coastal town of Taiji, famous for its unnecessary and unnecessarily brutal whaling and dolphin kills.

No less a luminary than the new foreign minister Okada has unwisely chosen to defend Taiji's defenseless slaughter of marine mammals by using the "culture" argument, which is to say, anything Japanese do that the international community disapproves of is okay, if it can be trumped up as a facet of Japanese culture.

This evokes the ghosts of the LDP past and hints of a Thermidor to come. "Culture" has been used by old school politicians to defend everything from keeping out Thai rice to refusing Russians entry to public baths, from creating structural impediments to foreign products and services, to refusing the full palette of human rights to Japanese of Chinese and Korean descent and resident foreigners.

Hiding behind the culture curtain is a willful act of obfuscation. It is a slippery slope of an argument, popular with tyrants and Taliban alike, and not a promising start for the leading diplomat of the new, reform-minded ruling party.

pc Read more on this article...

TIME FOR CHANGE

(from the Bangkok Post)
Time for change the Japanese can really believe in
Writer: PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
Published: 15/09/2009 at 12:00 AM

Japan has a new prime minister and a new ruling party. Prime ministers come and go in Tokyo on almost an annual basis, 50 of them in the post-war period alone, so the change of guard at the top of a huge, humming, well-oiled bureaucratic machine might not seem like news. But Hatoyama's ascension to power might be significant, if the long impotent opposition, now crystalised as the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), takes the helm long enough to steer Japan, Inc in a new direction.

Yukio Hatoyama, who was born on Sept 11, 1947, is nicknamed "The Alien" by his fellow party members for his quirky appearance and different way of thinking.

The DPJ's Hatoyama - like his predecessors in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso - is a political blueblood and financially secure. He is a member of the elite, which as Japanese like to see it, puts him a cut above the average man.

Like his elite predecessors, the new prime minister has strong personal links to America, not so much in terms of old-time family links with the Bushes or through party hacks on the CIA payroll or through verbal compliance with US fundamentalisms, but rather in meritocratic terms; he earned an advanced graduate degree at Stanford. He knows America but it's not the old boy network all over again. Much has been made of Mr Hatoyama's stated position that Japan needs to adjust its relationship with the US, setting off alarm bells in the corridors of entrenched power in Washington and Tokyo.

But that's just the old guard reasserting itself. What's wrong with some adjustments in a critical bilateral relationship that has been shaped by heavy-handed demands on one side and sneaky non-compliance on the other? Isn't it time to change, time to rejuvenate and re-define the bilateral relationship rather than relying on anachronistic and ossified patron-client links?

It is not as if the US-Japan security treaty is up for grabs, though it can and should be discussed and improved where necessary. After half a century of one-party rule in Japan, a fresh approach to foreign policy and collective security is not really an option, it's a necessity.

The Liberal Democratic Party, born of the ashes of WWII, branded with the imprint of US Occupation, has always been an odd hybrid, neither particularly liberal nor democratic, but an opportunistic mish-mash that was fine-tuned into a winning political machine.

Even if the US was uniformly enlightened in its Japan policy, which is hardly the case, being forced to rely on the Godzilla-like LDP as the main conduit for the conduct of bilateral relations has led to mutations and destructive distortions over the years.

One need only look at recent headlines to see how the LDP's past has continued to haunt the present, whether it be glorifying the lost cause of the last war at Yasukuni Shrine, or the vestiges of anti-communism in foreign policy and anti-labour practices, or the not-so-subtle intimidation of progressives by organised crime and rightwing groups for hire that are themselves relics of US occupation days.

More recently, a bungling obsession with North Korea continues to invoke unfinished business of Japan's historic annexation of its neighbour and what later became America's Korean war.

Then there's the LDP's almost military mindset when it comes to promoting big business and coddling modern-day zaibatsu, all the while building bridges to nowhere and churning out endless pork-barrel spending to nourish a rural elite/big business electoral juggernaut.

It's time for a change, all right, and the DPJ has seized the mantle of electoral legitimacy. The only question is whether the much-needed change will come about or will it be stalled, co-opted and buried by attack campaigns from the right, in concert with passive-aggressive non-compliance from powerful vested interests.

Prime Minister Hatoyama would be wise to take note of how US President Obama, who started out with so much promise, and such a huge mandate for change, only to end up tacking to the right and frittering much of his mandate away, betraying his own reform-minded base in the hopes of placating Wall Street, the Pentagon and America's implacable right wing. Mr Hatoyama and the DPJ face a comparable test, and early indications suggest they too will compromise and bend and revive existing patronage patterns, perhaps until the day that they are not recognisably different from the "fat cats" and the complacent ruling party that they have ostensibly replaced.

For change to have any real meaning, it has to exit the realm of rhetoric and enter the realm of action.

If the DPJ, with Mr Hatoyama at the helm, and former LDP stalwart Ozawa Ichiro navigating at his side, keep their promise to help Japan become a more normal nation - less dependent on the whims of US foreign policy, less beholden to Japan's own elite with its malignant, murky roots in the last world war, and more responsive to ordinary citizens and taxpayers, then Japan is indeed entering a period of change that people can believe in.

If, instead, however, the new government avoids friction by continuing along the beaten-down path created by the LDP, and in doing so sustains the unholy marriage between big business and an entrenched bureaucracy and concommitantly inflates its own military reach while hiding in the shade of the US security umbrella, then the demise of the LDP has been greatly exaggerated.

Even if they stick to their professed ideals, the new ruling team may still succumb to the inertia and stagnation that characterise Japan's body politic today, failing not only to fulfil the promises they made while not in power, but putting themselves out of power again.

In which case DPJ rule will prove not only brief, but may be one day understood not so much as a change in the power structure, but as a short-lived victory for some frustrated, veteran pols of the LDP reform wing, who will give Japan the illusion of change before deftly steering things back to the status quo of big business, big-bureaucracy as usual.

(first published in the Bangkok Post)

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Japan's LDP Rights Itself by Moving Away from the Right

By Philip J. Cunningham

Mukade, as the centipede is known in Japanese, are ubiquitous in the lushest parts of Japan, feasting on insects and small animals while scaring away competition. The hard-shelled arthopod can inflict a painful sting on anything that gets to close to its pincers, especially when cornered, but even after capture, the mukade is notoriously hard to vanquish. Merely stepping on it will not do the job, nor will a smack of the broom. To borrow the advice of a friend's father-in-law, you need a serious pair of scissors to do the job. Only when ripped asunder does the beast cease to resist.

That Japan's mountains remain green and thickly forested has something to do with the far-sighted and extremely selfish policy of cutting down other people's forests in places like Borneo and Burma to satisfy Japan's almost insatiable appetite for wood and wood products. But centipedes are also a force for keeping things green, as their aggressive ecology makes the idea of forest dwelling, or even living too close to a forest, icky and uncomfortable for human dwellers who don't like finding multiple-legged insects in their shoes in the morning or on the ceiling at night. The rainy season, when centipedes guard their young, is the most treacherous time of all.

Thus mukade, the humble centipede, provide a model of adaptation and persistance that anticipates, by several million years at least, samurai notions of hard-shelled toughness and the zealous guarding of turf.

The long-enduring Liberal Democratic Party of Japan recently came very close to being ripped asunder during the past rainy season after a devastating defeat in the polls followed by the humiliating retreat of a hard-line prime minister who rolled himself up into a protective ball when the going got tough.

A nuanced understanding of politics somehow eluded him, he, the cosseted scion of a rugged political family groomed for prominence from birth. Shinzo Abe, the champion of right wing invective and cruel innuendo complained sheepishly at the self-inflicted end of his tenure that politics was tougher than he thought.

Critically for the torn and tattered LDP, newly selected Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is a highly competent, low-key politician who is really hard to dislike. If you told him he didn't have any personality he would probably agree with you; it is precisely this genial agreeableness that makes him useful as a party unifier given the polemics of these times. The ultimate team player, though in every way Abe's senior, he had shrewdly withdrawn from running against Abe last year for the sake of party unity and as a gesture toward a multi-generational family friendship.

Taro Aso, in contrast, is naturally combative, controversial and careless in speech; not what the LDP needs to heal itself at this juncture.

I saw Fukuda and Aso duke it out at the height of their inner party campaign, during an unexpectedly generous whistle stop at the Foreign Correspondent's Club in Tokyo where the questions are tough and eligible voters are few.

What was most striking, aside from two very different conversational styles --Aso the raspy, straight-talking populist versus Fukuda, the mild-manner party bureaucrat whose voice barely broke the level of whisper—was that they held confusingly similar views on most topics.

But on closer examination there was method to that maddening lack of clarity.

Fukuda and Aso could have been two peas in a pod. It is true that, unlike Aso, Fukuda has made a clear statement that he will refuse to visit the Yasukuni shrine (controversial for Japan's neighbors because they consider some of the officers buried there to have committed war crimes during WW II). Fukuda's stance on the issue represents a clean break from the deliberately provocative stance of Koizumi and the deliberately ambiguous but essentially unapologetic stance of Aso, which echoes that of Abe. As veterans of the same old party, Fukuda and Aso are in every other respect quite similar. Aso's run for Prime Minister never really threatened Fukuda's chance of getting the nod, but it created sufficient political spectacle and democratic spirit to take the wind out of the sails of the LDP's real opponent, Democratic Party firebrand Ichiro Ozawa, who had held the initiative and political high ground for much of the summer, but failed to foil Fukuda.

It's no exaggeration to say that the LDP heaved a heavy sigh of relief when Fukuda took over the helm from the mysteriously absent and weirdly self-effacing Abe who had reportedly thrown in the towel due to intestinal distress.

One can only imagine the political bickering and crafty maneuvering behind the scenes in smoky rooms at which the wounded, staggering LDP found the gumption to suddenly reinvent itself. The right-leaning, war-glorifying wing of the party, led by Abe, had through mistaken policy and ineptitude, come close to cleaving the party in two. Like any well-designed bureaucracy, the LDP is composed of people, but it is also has a will to survive that extends beyond any particular individual member. When it found itself dangerously out of touch with what people were really thinking, the party did what it had to do, cutting its losses and changing tack.

So Abe's name is mud, despite the political blue-blood that flows in his veins. And Abe's like-thinking associate Aso, who by virtue of factional clout and service to the party might have rightly been the party's first choice for a shot at the top job, had to reconcile himself to the fact that it was in the LDP's best interest that he lose.

Indeed, there was audible relief outside the corridors of the LDP when the nod went to his opponent. For whatever Fukuda lacks in charisma, it is compensated by the perception that he is wise and willing to compromise. For whatever militant ideology he lacks, it is compensated by his political skills for getting things done more or less as they always have been done.

A TV crew from Fuji Television interviewed me immediately after the Fukuda-Aso debate. As I attempted to offer an impromptu "foreigner's" view, I said that I found Fukuda the more reassuring of the two because he wasn't so backward-looking as to want to drag Japan back into WWII values of the sort espoused by Abe and Aso. The crew shed the pretense of journalistic neutrality, nodding eagerly, as if they could hardly contain their hearty agreement. It wasn't an isolated incident, either, everywhere in the media, from newspaper stories to Sunday talk shows on TV, one could detect visible relief that, for the moment at least, Japan could put World War Two back in the past where it belongs and address more pressing social problems of the present and near future.

Koizumi got away with politically provocative but essentially naïve comments about international relations because he had the dramatic flair to wow an audience. I once saw him addressing a crowd outside a kabuki theatre and his presence drew a far more excited crowd response than the kabuki stars themselves.

In contrast, the dour Abe brought doubt to everything he touched. He frittered away valuable political capital inherited from Koizumi by re-imagining World War Two all over again and losing all over again. Whether it be in regard to the criminality of war criminals, or the willingness of comfort women to "comfort" or the mandated textbook changes that threatened to take the history of Okinawa away from the descendants of the people who suffered under the militarist's boot, Abe was tone-deaf and ideologically rigid to a fault.

Japanese democracy, imperfectly and indirectly expressed through a largely symbolic rejection of the ruling LDP in the Upper House elections in July, conveyed a message as clear as the last mid-term elections in the US; people are sick and tired of war talk and want politicians to focus on social issues, not warfare, real and imagined. On both sides of the Pacific, the people have said no to grandiose top-down ideologies that treat the common man as canon fodder for elite nationalistic dreams.

The people of Japan are inheritors of a twin tradition, as proponents of a terrible war and as victims of a terrible war. Japan's peace movement, born in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is powerful and not easily deterred. They have nurtured a war-renouncing constitution and citizen peace tradition almost unique in the world, and they have played a key role keeping Japan peaceful and at peace for six decades.

Japan's peace constituency, in terms of domestic power is the equal to, if not superior of the war-glorifying revisionist fringe, that gets all the bad press. The pacifists have spoken quietly and firmly and the message is simple: keep the peace.

Fukuda may consort with right-wingers and may depend on some of them for political capital, but he is hypo-allergenic and hygienic in comparison to the dirty politicians who propagate viruses of hate and nationalistic divisiviness. The Japanese body politic is showing signs of allergy to the right-wing revisionism of his predecessors. If Fukuda is to achieve anything at all, he must keep the rightists at bay.

Given the setbacks and debacles of Abe's singularly clumsy year of rule, the LDP has taken a corrective change of course that will prevent it from veering too far off course for the foreseeable future.

A centipede can lose a few feet and still feed itself, navigating the forest floor as before. To the consternation of Ozawa and other LDP foes, ready and waiting with scissors in hand as the dazed and disoriented political machine writhed on the ground, the multi-footed and functionally segmented LDP political machine has miraculously righted itself and is back on track.

The hard-shelled LDP is finding its way out of danger, one step at a time, doing what it was designed to do and always did best, which is to say, surviving, marching forward, despite daunting odds.

PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY
JAPAN Read more on this article...